The Frail Social Body

The Frail Social Body PDF Author: Carolyn J. Dean
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520923485
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
Amid the national shame and subjugation following World War I in France, cultural critics there—journalists, novelists, doctors, and legislators, among others—worked to rehabilitate what was perceived as an unhealthy social body. Carolyn J. Dean shows how these critics attempted to reconstruct the "bodily integrity" of the nation by pointing to the dangers of homosexuality and pornography. Dean's provocative work demonstrates the importance of this concept of bodily integrity in France and shows how it was ultimately used to define first-class citizenship. Dean presents fresh historical material—including novels and medical treatises—to show how fantasies about the body-violating qualities of homosexuality and pornography informed social perceptions and political action. Although she focuses on the period from 1890 to 1945, Dean also establishes the relevance of these ideas to current preoccupations with pornography and sexuality in the United States.

The Frail Social Body

The Frail Social Body PDF Author: Carolyn J. Dean
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520923485
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 284

Get Book Here

Book Description
Amid the national shame and subjugation following World War I in France, cultural critics there—journalists, novelists, doctors, and legislators, among others—worked to rehabilitate what was perceived as an unhealthy social body. Carolyn J. Dean shows how these critics attempted to reconstruct the "bodily integrity" of the nation by pointing to the dangers of homosexuality and pornography. Dean's provocative work demonstrates the importance of this concept of bodily integrity in France and shows how it was ultimately used to define first-class citizenship. Dean presents fresh historical material—including novels and medical treatises—to show how fantasies about the body-violating qualities of homosexuality and pornography informed social perceptions and political action. Although she focuses on the period from 1890 to 1945, Dean also establishes the relevance of these ideas to current preoccupations with pornography and sexuality in the United States.

Fictions of Dignity

Fictions of Dignity PDF Author: Elizabeth S. Anker
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801465192
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Over the past fifty years, debates about human rights have assumed an increasingly prominent place in postcolonial literature and theory. Writers from Salman Rushdie to Nawal El Saadawi have used the novel to explore both the possibilities and challenges of enacting and protecting human rights, particularly in the Global South. In Fictions of Dignity, Elizabeth S. Anker shows how the dual enabling fictions of human dignity and bodily integrity contribute to an anxiety about the body that helps to explain many of the contemporary and historical failures of human rights, revealing why and how lives are excluded from human rights protections along the lines of race, gender, class, disability, and species membership. In the process, Anker examines the vital work performed by a particular kind of narrative imagination in fostering respect for human rights. Drawing on phenomenology, Anker suggests how an embodied politics of reading might restore a vital fleshiness to the overly abstract, decorporealized subject of liberal rights. Each of the novels Anker examines approaches human rights in terms of limits and paradoxes. Rushdie's Midnight's Children addresses the obstacles to incorporating rights into a formerly colonized nation's legal culture. El Saadawi’s Woman at Point Zero takes up controversies over women’s freedoms in Islamic society. In Disgrace, J. M. Coetzee considers the disappointments of post-apartheid reconciliation in South Africa. And in The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy confronts an array of human rights abuses widespread in contemporary India. Each of these literary case studies further demonstrates the relevance of embodiment to both comprehending and redressing the failures of human rights, even while those narratives refuse simplistic ideals or solutions.

Desire

Desire PDF Author: Anna Clark
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135762910
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
‘... the rich range of historical information that Clark weaves into her chapters... makes this ambitious overview of sex in Europe a highly accessible and successful endeavour.’ – Times Higher Education Supplement 'Provides a valuable overview of the history of sexuality in Europe since classical antiquity, synthesising as it does a mass of studies of specific regions and periods which have appeared during the last two decades.' Lesley Hall, Wellcome Library, UK Desire: A History of European Sexuality is a sweeping survey of sexuality in Europe from the Greeks to the present day. It traces two concepts of sexual desire that have competed in European history: desire as dangerous, polluting, and disorderly; and desire as creative, transcendent, even revolutionary. This book follows these changing attitudes toward sexuality through the major turning points of European history. Written in a lively and engaging style, the book contains many fascinating anecdotes drawing on a rich array of sources including poetry, novels, pornography and film as well as court records, autobiographies and personal letters. While Anna Clark builds on the work of dozens of historians, she also takes a fresh approach and introduces the concepts of twilight moments and sexual economies. Desire integrates the history of heterosexuality with same-sex desire, and focuses on the emotions of love as well as the passions of lust, the politics of sex as well as the personal experiences.

The Dreyfus Affair and the Crisis of French Manhood

The Dreyfus Affair and the Crisis of French Manhood PDF Author: Christopher E. Forth
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801874338
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Finally, he examines the relation of the Dreyfus Affair to the culture of forcethat marked French society during the prewar years, thus accounting for the rise of the youthful athlete as a more compelling manly ideal than the bookish and sedentary intellectual.

The Law of Kinship

The Law of Kinship PDF Author: Camille Robcis
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801468396
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
In France as elsewhere in recent years, legislative debates over single-parent households, same-sex unions, new reproductive technologies, transsexuality, and other challenges to long-held assumptions about the structure of family and kinship relations have been deeply divisive. What strikes many as uniquely French, however, is the extent to which many of these discussions—whether in legislative chambers, courtrooms, or the mass media—have been conducted in the frequently abstract vocabularies of anthropology and psychoanalysis. In this highly original book, Camille Robcis seeks to explain why and how academic discourses on kinship have intersected and overlapped with political debates on the family—and on the nature of French republicanism itself. She focuses on the theories of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan, both of whom highlighted the interdependence of the sexual and the social by positing a direct correlation between kinship and socialization. Robcis traces how their ideas gained recognition not only from French social scientists but also from legislators and politicians who relied on some of the most obscure and difficult concepts of structuralism to enact a series of laws concerning the family. Lévi-Strauss and Lacan constructed the heterosexual family as a universal trope for social and psychic integration, and this understanding of the family at the root of intersubjectivity coincided with the role that the family has played in modern French law and public policy. The Law of Kinship contributes to larger conversations about the particularities of French political culture, the nature of sexual difference, and the problem of reading and interpretation in intellectual history.

Violent Sensations

Violent Sensations PDF Author: Scott Spector
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022619681X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
Around the turn of the twentieth century, Vienna and Berlin were centers of scientific knowledge, accompanied by a sense of triumphalism and confidence in progress. Yet they were also sites of fascination with urban decay, often focused on sexual and criminal deviants and the tales of violence surrounding them. Sensational media reports fed the prurient public’s hunger for stories from the criminal underworld: sadism, sexual murder, serial killings, accusations of Jewish ritual child murder—as well as male and female homosexuality. In Violent Sensations, Scott Spector explores how the protagonists of these stories—people at society’s margins—were given new identities defined by the groundbreaking sciences of psychiatry, sexology, and criminology, and how this expert knowledge was then transmitted to an eager public by journalists covering court cases and police investigations. The book analyzes these sexual and criminal subjects on three levels: first, the expertise of scientists, doctors, lawyers, and scholars; second, the sensationalism of newspaper scandal and pulp fiction; and, third, the subjective ways that the figures themselves came to understand who they were. Throughout, Spector answers important questions about how fantasies of extreme depravity and bestiality figure into the central European self-image of cities as centers of progressive civilization, as well as the ways in which the sciences of social control emerged alongside the burgeoning emancipation of women and homosexuals.

A Companion to Western Historical Thought

A Companion to Western Historical Thought PDF Author: Lloyd Kramer
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0585470936
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 536

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Book Description
This broad survey introduces readers to the major themes, figures,traditions and theories in Western historical thought, tracing itsevolution from biblical times to the present. Surveys the evolution of historical thought in the WesternWorld from biblical times to the present day. Provides students with the background to contemporaryhistorical debates and approaches. Serves as a useful reference for researchers andteachers. Includes chapters by 24 leading historians.

The Inter-War Crisis

The Inter-War Crisis PDF Author: Richard Overy
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317862511
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 146

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Book Description
The inter-war years were, at the time, perceived to be years of crisis across the world. The First World War, ‘the war to end all wars’, had solved nothing and its legacy was a world full of unresolved disputes and manifest ambiguities. Overy examines the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the subsequent economic crisis which struck at the very foundations of the capitalist world, and seeks to explain why dictatorships came to supplant democracy in Italy, Spain, Germany, the Baltic States and the Balkans, and why the world slid into war once more in 1939.

Communicating in Canada's Past

Communicating in Canada's Past PDF Author: Gene Allen
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442697008
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 694

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Book Description
Communicating in Canada's Past evolved out of essays presented at the inaugural Conference on Media History in Canada of 2006, which brought together media historians from across the disciplines and from both French and English Canada. The first collection of its kind, this volume assembles both well-established and up-and-coming scholars to address sizable gaps in the literature on media history in Canada. Communicating in Canada's Past includes a substantial introduction to media history as a field of study, historiographical essays by senior scholars Mary Vipond, Paul Rutherford, and Fernande Roy, and original research essays on a range of subjects, including print journalism, radio, television, and advertising. Editors Gene Allen and Daniel J. Robinson have provided a sophisticated, wide-ranging introduction for those who are new to media history while also assembling a valuable collection of new research and theory for those already familiar with the field.

Sex and the Weimar Republic

Sex and the Weimar Republic PDF Author: Laurie Marhoefer
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442619570
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 359

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Book Description
Liberated, licentious, or merely liberal, the sexual freedoms of Germany’s Weimar Republic have become legendary. The home of the world’s first gay rights movement, the republic embodied a progressive, secular vision of sexual liberation. Immortalized – however misleadingly – in Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories and the musical Cabaret, Weimar’s freedoms have become a touchstone for the politics of sexual emancipation. Yet, as Laurie Marhoefer shows in Sex and Weimar Republic, those sexual freedoms were only obtained at the expense of a minority who were deemed sexually disordered. In Weimar Germany, the citizen’s right to sexual freedom came with a duty to keep sexuality private, non-commercial, and respectable. Sex and the Weimar Republic examines the rise of sexual tolerance through the debates which surrounded “immoral” sexuality: obscenity, male homosexuality, lesbianism, transgender identity, heterosexual promiscuity, and prostitution. It follows the sexual politics of a swath of Weimar society ranging from sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld to Nazi stormtrooper Ernst Röhm. Tracing the connections between toleration and regulation, Marhoefer’s observations remain relevant to the politics of sexuality today.